Zogby: Obama Approval at only 48%

UTICA, New York—A new Zogby Interactive survey shows a slight decline in President Barack Obama’s job approval, with 48% of likely voters now approving of the job he is doing as president, down from 51% who said the same in an interactive/telephone hybrid poll conducted in mid-June. Forty-nine percent now say they disapprove of the job the president has done so far in office and 4% are not sure.

The survey found similar results when likely voters were asked specifically to rate President Obama’s performance—47% give him a positive rating, with 22% rating his job performance as “excellent” and 25% rating it as “good.” But slightly more than half (53%) give the president a negative job performance rating, with 10% who say he is doing a “fair” job as president and 43% who say he is doing a “poor” job—up from 36% who said he was doing a poor job in mid-June. (Zogby uses a four-point scale of excellent, good, fair and poor, and aggregates excellent and good to determine positive ratings.)

The Zogby Interactive survey of 4,470 likely voters nationwide was conducted July 21-24, 2009 and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.5 percentage points. (accent is mine)